Help to Buy Scheme

[GreenVoyage]

To any you who have used this to buy a house at all AIBU to ask how much money you needed in the end to buy the house? 5% deposit plus any fees e.g. solicitor.

I want to know how much roughly we would need before we are ready to Buy and have no one to ask!

[Forgottencoffee]

We bought a new build in June 2017 with Help to Buy, I've just copied the prices and description from our completion statement, hopefully it will be of some help to you.

Our house was £169,995

Deposit: £8497.50
Mortgage: £127,260
Help to buy: £33,990
Stamp duty: £899
Engrossment fee: £180
Legal fees: £519.21
VAT: £103.84
Mortgage fee – purchase: £50 + £4 VAT
Money Laundering ID Checks: £20 + £4 VAT
Stamp duty land tax form: £50 + £10 VAT
Telegraphic transfer fee: £25 + £5 VAT
Land registry bankruptcy fee: £4
Lands charges act search: £3
Land registry registration fee: £190
Chancel indemnity £15.95

[GreenVoyage]

That is a massive help thank you! I had no idea about some of those costs!

[Forgottencoffee]

No problem. It's all a bit daunting isn't it? We bought a house with Persimmon Homes and used their recommended solicitor and I've got to say, they were brilliant. I think most of the fees in my list are classes as "legal fees" but are broken down by the solicitor for the sake of clarity. Good luck with it all!

[GreenVoyage]

Ah lovely! Can I be really cheeky and ask much much roughly your mortgage repayments are?

[TheresALight]

@forgottencoffee do you mind me asking how much you paid for things like flooring and tiling?
We're very interested in getting a new build once we've got the money for legal fees sorted but not sure how much we need to budget for the house
And are you planning to save up to pay off the equity loan? Or sell the house to cover it?

[GreenVoyage]

Good question @TheresALight. Gosh we are nosey! Haha!

[ReasonableLlama]

In my experience: We put down 5% deposit and got the rest as a Mortgage. It wasn't a new build. When we instructed a solicitor (through our mortgage broker) they send a statement of fees through like what @Forgottencoffee listed.

We remortgaged the following year and got a better rate as LTV changed to 90%

[TheresALight]

Sorry if I offended you @forgottencoffee but I'm a bit daunted by the equity loan and have no idea if it's worth us using the scheme because I would ideally not want to move house! Send with the 'extras ' like floors and tiles it's very hard to budget if you can't see a price list from the developer until after you've committed to buying the house! It's not like I'm going to knock on your neighbours' doors and tell them how much you paid for the floor and see if they got a better deal!

[TheresALight]

Maybe a better way to word my questions would be 'How much do you think I'd need to save you cover the main 'extras' like flooring and tiles if I'm going for mid range, options'? And 'Has anyone looked into the best way to pau back the government loan so without having to move'?

[Hopefaithillegality]

You have 5 years with no payments on the loan so you can remortgage in the 5 years to absorb the loan. Or you can step ladder which means paying of a bit at a time or you can move or sell up. You will need a surveyor to come and value your house as htb will want 20% payed back to them. This is the case if you just want to remortgage they will want 20% of the current house value not the purchase price.
But after 5 years you will have to start making payments on the loan monthly. Like a second mortgage payment I suppose but less.

Also please try and negotiate with the new build sales office. Don't just accept paying for flooring as they have got a budget for this. Some companies won't budge but if you are in a position to wait until the house is nearly finished then it may come with flooring.
I am in the south east and have just sold my htb property and buying a new house with htb. We have put down 10% not 5 % deposit however.

We got all our flooring Inc and stamp duty because it was one of the last houses on the plot.
It was the same for the house I have just sold and I got 20k of the purchase price. Flooring for a standard 3 bed semi will be about 7k
Sorry if I'm rambling hope this helps

[Forgottencoffee]

@TheresALight we bought our house through Persimmon Homes who included flooring and turf, they also paid for our stamp duty and £1000 towards our legal fees as incentives. Our house had already been built when we reserved it as the previous buyer pulled out last minute, as a consequence all tiles had already been chosen by them. As such, I am not au fait with the process of buying a new build from scratch but I believe tiling is included as standard but only from their basic range and you pay extra to 'upgrade' to a better quality tile or to include more tiles (e.g. all the bathroom rather than just above the bath). I do know however, that flooring is not included as standard and unless you pay the company to install it you move in with concrete floors. Other new build owner/buyers have advised that the new build company tend to be expensive and it was much more cost effective to purchase flooring through another company (e.g. carpetright), the only issue here is you can't have floor installed until you complete and have the keys.

I'm afraid I cannot answer your question regarding equity loan, I've left the finance side to DH

[Beetlejizz]

There's such massive variation on things like mortgage payments OP. The scheme has been going a couple of years and people's mortgages could be a couple of hundred a month or a couple of thousand.

You want to check out first of all the prices for the sort of house in the sort of area you want. This will give you an idea about how much stamp duty will cost, if applicable, and also the size of deposit you're likely to need and how much your repayments would potentially be.

People can tell you how much their conveyancing cost but that's not much use if the solicitors in your area charge differently. You could ring round the conveyancing solicitors where you live and get some quotes now.

There's also the question of mortgage brokers, are you likely to use one? The less attractive/standard a borrower you are, the more likely you are to benefit from one. We did use one when we bought a while back and the fee was £290 I think. But lots of people don't.

[TheresALight]

@hopefaithillegality and @forgottencoffee thank you both very much for your responses, they will really help. Sorry if I came across as snipy before. I'll do some maths and see if the possibility of remortgaging at the 5 years would work for us as there's no way we could raise 20% in 5 years on top of mortgage payments. Thank you both

[YellowEllis]

[quote TheresALight]**@hopefaithillegality* and @forgottencoffee* thank you both very much for your responses, they will really help. Sorry if I came across as snipy before. I'll do some maths and see if the possibility of remortgaging at the 5 years would work for us as there's no way we could raise 20% in 5 years on top of mortgage payments. Thank you both[/quote]
@TheresALight Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but how did things turn out for you with remortgaging to pay off help to buy rather than moving? We are hoping to do the same in 5 years

[TheresALight]

Hi @yellowellis I cant help sorry as we decided to buy a house which wasn't new build so didn't do Help 2 Buy in the end